Holly Graham

A Pleasure, a Rush, Weak at the Knees

An iteration of the Sweet Swollen project, installed as part of a group exhibition titled ‘The Oval Window’, at Gerald Moore Gallery, 2019.

The works include a selection of sugarlift etchings: steel plates depicting the gesturing hands of blackamoor figurines, and aluminium plates showing 20th century industrial sweet food production processes in London, cropped from photo archives at Southwark Local History Library and newsreel film footage documenting the 1974 Tate & Lyle sugar workers strike.

These are accompanied by texts compiled from fragmentary voices. Snippets of conversations with V&A African Heritage tour guides circulating around a pair of caricatured sugar bowls in the museum collection are collaged together with William Morris quotations on home-ware aesthetics and utility, and sit alongside contemporary critical reflections “on blackness and being” by posited by theorists Christina Sharpe and Stuart Hall. These in turn nestle between extracts from newspaper cuttings, such as South London Press’s 1901 article ‘The Jam Industry’, and The Southwark Recorder’s 1891 write-up ‘The Grocers’ Chronicle’. The voices are stitched together to construct a gloopy and slippery narrative around sweetness and power; a collision of temporalities and subjectivities; violent and sticky histories.